Date: Tue, 19 Dec 2000 20:50:12 -0600 From: seebs@plethora.net (Peter Seebach) To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: FreeBSD vs Linux, Solaris, and NT Message-ID: <200012200250.UAA07694@guild.plethora.net> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Tue, 19 Dec 2000 21:03:33 EST." <3A401375.9483F773@bellatlantic.net>
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In message <3A401375.9483F773@bellatlantic.net>, Sergey Babkin writes: >Jeremiah Gowdy wrote: >> pull off. Not that I don't appreciate the work of the people who write BSD >> drivers, the people who put time and effort into BSD drivers are some of my >> favorite people in the world, but it's terribly obvious that if a card or >> device is not documented, that the company is going to provide a better >> binary driver than what a BSD programmer could put together (okay, broad >> generalization, but I'll stand by it in most cases). The closed source >A gross misconcept. If someone has full set of docs that does not mean >that he actually does read and understand them completely. Worse >yet, the authors of commercial drivers often have a very vague >idea of how their drivers should interact with the OS. I would just like to tell you all how lucky you are that you *can't* see the code for the "binary-only" drivers used in BSD/OS. It's not that they're necessarily horribly buggy, but these are people to whom "KNF" is probably just the name of some German company. I would rather have a driver written by a competent kernel hacker who is familiar with the system, and has limited information about the hardware, in most cases. Even *very* limited experience may do it; I'm not exactly a kernel guy, and the NetBSD-on-VirtualPC patches were a lot easier for me than they would have been for the Connectix people. (On the other hand, the fixes to VPC were probably easier for them.) -s To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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